Well I have done a lot of research and that washer isn't for my needs. I talked it over with a few people, including the Safety Kleen people, so now I am going to try a few other machines. First machine to show up is the Safety Kleen AQ-1
This Machine retails for $3950.00 without cleaner and no contract with Safety Kleen. If you sign a 2 year contract the machine is $2750.00. They offered the washer to me for a few weeks to try.
The top sink/lid is about 2' square and 6" deep. This also acts as the lid to the washer inside. The lid didn't leek at all when the machine was running.
This is the inside under the lid. The area to the left is just a spot to put parts and let the water spray and wash things off. The little area up and to the right is a spot to put small parts to soak. There is a petcock that you open to regulate the flow out of that soaker.
I took off the side cover to show the internals to you. This is the temp control and pump, This is all behind a panel that is held on by several screws.
This is the timer that they gave me with the machine. I think that this is an afterthought. Kind of cheep if you ask me. Well my thoughts of the machine over all were that it is really nice and I wanted it to work as well as it was built. The first problem that i ran into was that the Heating element just isn't big enough for this machine. It took almost 5 hours to reach the pre programed operating temp of 135 degrees. When you run the pump to use the sink or the wash tank, the element turns off. After a 15 minute wash cycle the tank temp dropped 10 to 15 degrees. This took almost an hour to recover from. I ended up moving the washer out in the sun to give it a hand at staying warm. The next thing, 135 just didn't seem warm enough to clean the parts. I reset the temp up to 140 degrees, this helped some. I think warmer would be better but I couldn't personally stand to use the sink if it were any warmer. 140 degrees was all my skin could take. So after the machine reached operating temp I washed several parts. After a few 15 minute cycles the were fairly clean, but just not clean enough. There was a oil film with dirt left behind. I had to take and put the parts in the sink and scrub the last little off. Another thing that just seemed like poor forthought, the temp control has a temp reading that tells the current temp of the wash solution. Well that display is behind that panel that I had to take off. If you look through the crack in the seem you can just make out what the temp is. Why couldn't that be placed where you could see and use it? Just seemed like it was more time consuming than using my old washer. At the end of the day I just called Safety Kleen and said pick it up, because it wasn't going to work for me. I think that this is an almost machine, it is like they just need to do some more research to get it right.
My next machine is going to be a Cuda 2412 top loading water based cleaning machine. I let you guys know how that goes.
